Thursday, December 29, 2011

headline from 2013: "Banks reclaim assets during bankruptcy proceedings, mortagees without proper equity evicted" In what was at first hailed as a victory for fairness banks and corporations have been required to go through bankruptcy as a condition of the most recent bailout promoted by president Snookie. But many are now coming to criticize the proceedings as banks have engaged in a practice called "untranchificatory rehyperintercalibration" made possible by the retroactively applicable amendments to bankruptcy law passed by the new Congress dominated by the Party for the Resurgence of Original American Constitutional Liberties. People who used to be refered to as "homeowners" have now been reclassified as "underpayers" if they have less than 32% equity in the home. Asked if this was fair, a spokesperson for the newly formed International Banking Cartel Committee for the Transition to Global Freedom had the following to say: " We believe that these underperforming assets need to be reclaimed by the productive classes for the purposes of bringing prospertiy back to the hard-working, freedom-loving members of the New Reformed Church of the Imminent Revelation." http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/article30085.htm#idc-cover

“The MF Global scandal has made it clear that the integrity of the system has disappeared,” said a good friend of mine, Tuur Demeester, who runs Macrotrends, a Dutch-language newsletter out of Brugge. “The banks are insolvent, the governments are insolvent, and all that’s left is for the people to realize what’s going on—and that will start a panic.”

"You see, when a nation threatens another nation the people of the latter forget their factionalism, their local antagonisms, their political differences, their suspicions of each other, their religious hostilities, and band together as one unit. Leaders know that, and that is why so many of them whip up wars during periods of national crisis, or when the people become discontented and angry.

The leaders stigmatize the enemy with every vice they can think of, every evil and human depravity. They stimulate their people's natural fear of all other men by channeling it into a defined fear of just certain men, or nations. Attacking another nation, then, acts as a sort of catharsis, temporarily, on men's fear of their immediate neighbors.

This is the explanation of all wars, all racial and religious hatreds, all massacres, and all attempts at genocide."--Taylor Caldwell, "The Devil?s Advocate" (1952) - pg. 299

Monday, December 26, 2011

I had always assumed it was impossible and that strict internal controls existed at all brokerage firms so that firm officials couldn’t tap segregated customer funds even if they were willing to break the law. Thanks to MF Global, it’s now apparent that isn’t necessarily true. “If people are determined to misuse customer funds, they will misuse them,” said Ananda Radhakrishnan, the director of the division of clearing and risk at the Commodities Futures Trading Commission.

That’s because the commodities and securities industry is mostly self-regulating, and self-regulation ultimately depends on the integrity of the regulated.

Sunday, December 25, 2011

If you have ever wondered how a serial murderer -- a murderer who is sane and fully aware of the acts he has committed -- can remain steadfastly convinced of his own moral superiority and show not even the slightest glimmer of remorse, you should not wonder any longer.

The United States government is such a murderer. It conducts its murders in full view of the entire world. It even boasts of them. Our government, and all our leading commentators, still maintain that the end justifies the means -- and that even the slaughter of hundreds of thousands of innocents is of no moral consequence, provided a sufficient number of people can delude themselves into believing the final result is a "success."

...We can appeal all we want to "American exceptionalism," but any "exceptionalism" that remains ours is that of a mass murderer without a soul, and without a conscience. ... It is useless to appeal to any "American" sense of morality: we have none. It does not matter how immense the pile of corpses grows: we will not surrender or even question our delusion that we are right, and that nothing we do can be profoundly, unforgivably wrong.

One day, the war on terrorism will come to an end. All wars do. And when it does, we will find ourselves still living in fear: not of terrorism or radical Islam, but of the domestic rulers that fear has left behind.” — Corey Robin

By keeping all your assets in the country where you live, you commit, ahead of time, to ratify whatever policy your home government might adopt, no matter how objectionable, unreasonable or pernicious that policy happens to be. If the next new mandate is "Register today to get a nail pounded into your head," you're already signed up.

when President George W. Bush and Vice President Dick Cheney confess that they ordered waterboarding and other acts that have long been regarded as illegal torture, they and their subordinates are spared prosecution, presumably because to do otherwise would stir up a political mess. Suddenly, clear violations of the law must be set aside as being outweighed by larger national considerations, i.e. political comity in Washington. But no such balancing act is available to spare Pvt. Manning possible life imprisonment for truth-telling, even when many experts believe much good has come from the disclosures, including inspiration for the Arab Spring’s ouster of dictators whose brutality and corruption were frankly described in the WikiLeaks cables.

Commentary: We spend billions on poorly made useless things

The point is: You may be an efficient shopper when you buy things for yourself — say, a sweater you might actually like — but you are lousy at picking out surprises for others, especially grandchildren, nieces, nephews, cousins and others you don’t often see.

Obviously, an entire book could be written on this subject, which is a task beyond the scope of this article. The purpose of the following piece is to give those with financial difficulty a foothold on prepping without added pain. It is meant to be a starting point, not a compendium

Thursday, December 22, 2011

Today, we've basically been reprogrammed to think that we need permission from the government to exercise our inalienable rights, when in fact the government is supposed to derive its power from us. The American Republic was designed so that government would serve the People to protect and uphold freedom and liberty. But increasingly, our own government is restricting people from their rights to engage in commonsense, fundamental actions such as collecting rainwater or buying raw milk from the farmer next door.

Today, we are living under a government that has slowly siphoned off our freedoms, only to occasionally grant us back a few limited ones under the pretense that they're doing us a benevolent favor.

Wednesday, December 21, 2011

The New Breed of Hero

The United States has done a remarkable job over the years convincing you that the folks in law enforcement are here for no other reason then to "protect and serve." The words sound honorable and are meant to instill trust and confidence. You see this worn out, duplicitous motto emblazoned across every squad car in every small town across America. But it has become just another slogan that means nothing at all any longer. In an earlier essay I wrote about buzzwords; words politicians like to spew out when speaking to the people. We’ve heard liberty, freedom and democracy so often , they have become nothing but empty, meaningless, over-used words, just like the slogan, "protect and serve." Perhaps they never did mean anything, but we – the American people – were brainwashed into believing that somehow they meant something important. We’ve been duped into thinking that the people of law enforcement are here to actually protect us and to serve us as humble, appreciative public servants. But as I have come to realize, this is really not the case at all. In fact, their ultimate end purpose may prove to be far more sinister as time goes on. Maybe law enforcement’s new motto should be "subdue and enslave", because this is what their mission now seems to be. Growing up, I was taught to respect the men in law enforcement. I was told that you could trust men in uniform and they were people of integrity. I say only men, because when I was a kid you didn’t see any women-men like you do today. What’s a woman-man you ask? I think you know what I mean. Rough gals. You see them everywhere in law enforcement; females out to prove something to somebody. Maybe they feel cheated because they were born without a ……..Well, you know what I’m saying. They are the unattractive, masculine creatures you see acting like tough guys . Just like the type of men now attracted to law enforcement; genetically short-changed . The type we made fun of as kids. They were the misfits, the bullies and the weirdoes and they now are the ones wearing the uniforms. Maybe its always been this way, but I seem to notice it more today than ever before. This is the type of personality I see on all levels of law enforcement ; angry people who have some insatiable need to control others . This is the new small-minded, tough guy breed now attracted to police work. They saw how those in uniform were revered after 9/11 and they ,too, wanted in on this new hero business. Everyday I read stories about police abusing their authority: unnecessary beatings, questionable shootings, and torturous tazings. It is not my imagination, it seems to be happening everywhere. In small towns in the rural Midwest to the big cities of New York and Los Angeles, and all points in between, cops are abusing and killing people at an alarming rate. I know there are bad guys out there and some of these cases are justified, but too often, it is the cops who are guilty of escalating the situation into something more violent. With cellular technology, we are now able to see what has been going on for years. Go to Youtube.com and see for yourself. Type in "police brutality" and watch what comes up. You can see actual footage of a particular event, allowing you be the judge. Something has gone terribly wrong in America. You see it in their surly attitude and cocky demeanor and blatant disregard for civil liberties. They no longer see themselves as public servants, but instead as overseers of an unruly public; all of us to be treated accordingly; with a heavy hand. And it is scary how military-like they have become; not only in appearance but in attitude. Every small force in every one-horse town across the country is now run like some independent army unit, with an overweight police chief pompously displaying his four silver stars on his collar. Make no mistake about it, police across America now see the general public as the new enemy, and themselves as the frontline soldiers in a war against the people. 9/11 has allowed them to unleash their aggression under the guise of fighting terrorism. This perverse approach to policing will only attract a strange crowd; mentally troubled individuals desperate to prove how tough they are. What kind of person tazes an 80-year-old woman? What kind of cowardly man beats an unarmed, mentally ill homeless man to death? What kind of human being shoots a sleeping baby through a plate glass window? What kind of chickenshit weakling feels so threatened by a 15-year-old girl holding a screwdriver 30 feet away that he opens fire, killing her? The answer to all four questions is simple: Cops! And they are doing it more frequently than ever before. They have truly been given a license to kill and in many cases, using that license to full advantage.Let me focus on one case; the Kelly Thomas murder here in Fullerton, California. Six cops beat a 30-year-old, unarmed, mentally ill homeless man to death. They beat him into a coma and he died five days later. They broke ribs, fractured facial bones and broke his thorax which eventually caused his death. Hospital pictures show the face of a human being beaten beyond recognition. All this because of an anonymous call to 911 saying a man was looking into car windows and pulling on door handles. The officers responding to the call knew Kelly and demanded to search his backpack. Frightened and confused, he took off running, leaving the backpack behind. The cops caught up to him and began their deadly assault. A young man is now dead because of an anonymous report of someone looking into car windows. Hardly seems worth killing a man over, but they did. How does this happen? Of the six officers involved only two have been charged. The other four are on administrative leave. I’m amazed the District Attorney even filed against the two. Most of the time in cases like these, the police department involved will claim the incident was justified and tell the public it is under investigation and then you never hear about it ever again. But the real question here is where does this form of brutal policing stem from? What kind of twisted, sick human being could beat a man to death in front of approximately 100 witnesses and think he can get away with it? A man who has been given tacit approval from higher up, that’s who. And this is the problem. The cover-up began right away and started with the chief himself. All the officers involved remained on duty for four weeks after Kelly’s death. If it hadn’t been for public outcry, I’m sure these officers would still be on duty today, protecting and serving the citizens of Fullerton. Which tells me this type of behavior is tolerated if not encouraged by superiors. Testimony revealed that one of the officers later boasted about, "f-----g up a homeless guy", as if he had performed some noble task. Incidents like this seem to be much more prevalent since 9/11. Have you grown tired of the word "hero"? I sure have. The traditional definition of "hero" was rewritten after 9/11. We now are constantly reminded of how those in uniform gave their lives helping others .But isn’t this what they signed on to do? I have no doubt that some involved in the rescue effort during the attack on the World Trade Center acted in a heroic manner. However, they were merely doing what they were hired to do. Simply doing your job doesn’t make everyone who died in uniform a hero. Have you ever noticed when the events of 9/11 are mentioned in the media, the word "hero" is used only when referring to those first responders who died that morning in the tragic attack? You never hear the term used when referring to all the other victims who died performing their duty on that same day. What about the secretary who also reported to work that morning? The computer programmer sitting at his desk? And the janitor in uniform performing his duty when the attack occurred, isn’t he just as much of a hero? Apparently not. Only the policemen and firemen are heroes, and no one else. This new concept of "hero" has trickled down to the street cops patrolling our towns across America; causing them to lose sight of what they are really here for; "to protect and serve" the American public. Something really ugly has happened to my country. 9/11 seems to have given police the green light on aggressive, unlawful behavior. Malevolent policing has become par for the course. Police now have a tremendous lack of respect for the very people they were sworn to "protect and serve". I don’t know how much the American people are willing to tolerate before fighting back, or if they even will. Any organized movement will be quickly squashed as we saw with the Occupy Wall Street attempt. The slogan "protect and serve" will mean even less in the future as the creatures of law enforcement abuse the rights of citizens. In order for the government to really clamp down on civil liberties, they need soldiers on the street willing to carry out the orders. They will need thugs to implement their plans. Are they concerned? No. The creatures of law enforcement are already in place and are more than willing to start cracking heads; anxious to be recognized as the new "heroes" in the war against the American people.

December 21, 2011

Gingrich Plummets in Polls as Voters Start Remembering Who He Is

Dawning Awareness Threatens Campaign

DES MOINES (The Borowitz Report) – In a development that has imperiled his front-runner status in the Republican presidential race, former House Speaker Newt Gingrich has plunged in the polls as voters have begun to remember who he is.

Mr. Gingrich had been surging in recent weeks, but according to pollster Davis Logsdon of the University of Minnesota’s Opinion Research institute, “That was before people's memories of who New Gingrich is started gradually kicking in.”

According to a new poll released today, Mr. Gingrich fared especially poorly among voters who agreed with the statement, “Wait a minute, that guy? He was an enormous dick.”

“Newt Gingrich has got to do something fast to keep people from remembering who he is,” pollster Logsdon said. “He might try growing a moustache or wearing an eye patch, but that might be too little, too late.”

On the ground in Iowa, Gingrich campaign strategists are working overtime to confront the challenge posed by voters remembering who he is, aides to the former House Speaker said today.

According to one campaign source, the Gingrich campaign has begun seeking the support of people with mental disorders and other memory issues that make it hard for them to retain basic information.

“The problem is, most of those people are currently running for President,” the source said

This is the last in a series. We began by wondering how come some people get to boss other people around...

We’re not talking about wives and husbands or employees and their employers. In those cases, the bossing is legit. Husbands ask for it. And employees can walk off the job anytime they like.

We’re talking about people who have the right — by law — to tell other people what to do. The TSA agent...the policeman...the building inspector...the customs agent...the IRS clerk...the FDA...the CIA...the FBI...

It is a remarkable thing, don’t you think, dear reader? It says right there in the Declaration of Independence that ‘all men are created equal.’ Equality under the law is supposed to be the law of the land. And yet, some people are clearly above the law...some give orders to complete strangers...and some people even claim the right to make laws any way they want.

There are laws that tell you not to murder...and not to steal. In the 10 Commandments given to Moses, God named 10 laws that he considered important. But the folks walking the floors of Congress, the EPA, the SEC, the IRS and a plethora of other government agencies have added 10,000 more commandments. ‘Thou shalt’ this... ‘thou shalt not’ that. You can barely go to the bathroom or drill an oil well, without asking permission from a dozen different bureaucracies. ‘Ignorance of the law,’ is said to be an ineffective defense. But it’s a very effective explanation. There are so many laws, rules, regulations, edicts, commandments, prohibitions, interdictions, injunctions, requirements and obligations that you are bound to miss one or two of them.

The latest Defense Authorization Bill just passed by Congress shows how far the law-makers and law-enforcers will go. The doctrine of habeas corpus goes back to before the signing of the Magna Carta in 1215. It was an ancient Anglo-Saxon limitation on the power of government. If the feds held a prisoner, a writ of habeas corpus required them to “produce the body.” The government had to either release the person or charge him with a crime. For more than 800 years, this gave people some protection against government.

But now, in the Year of Our Lord 2011, the Congress of the United States of America, with the complicity of POTUS, himself, has seen fit to deny the right of habeas corpus to American citizens. Henceforth, the feds can capture you, put you in prison and waterboard you every day for the rest of your life. They don’t have to charge you with murder or jay-walking or any crime at all. They don’t have to let you talk to a lawyer. Or to your spouse. Or to your Congressman... They don’t have to read you your rights or provide any evidence against you. Like the Argentines in the ’80s, they just ‘disappear’ you. And you’re gone forever.

The Guardian reports:

Human rights groups accused the president of deserting his principles and disregarding the long-established principle that the military is not used in domestic policing. The legislation has also been strongly criticised by libertarians on the right angered at the stripping of individual rights for the duration of “a war that appears to have no end”.

The law, contained in the defence authorisation bill that funds the US military, effectively extends the battlefield in the “war on terror” to the US and applies the established principle that combatants in any war are subject to military detention.

“It’s something so radical that it would have been considered crazy had it been pushed by the Bush administration,” said Tom Malinowski of Human Rights Watch. “It establishes precisely the kind of system that the United States has consistently urged other countries not to adopt. At a time when the United States is urging Egypt, for example, to scrap its emergency law and military courts, this is not consistent.”

Rand Paul, a strong libertarian, has said “detaining citizens without a court trial is not American” and that if the law passes “the terrorists have won”.

“We’re talking about American citizens who can be taken from the United States and sent to a camp at Guantánamo Bay and held indefinitely. It puts every single citizen American at risk,” he said. “Really, what security does this indefinite detention of Americans give us? The first and flawed premise, both here and in the badly named Patriot Act, is that our pre-9/11 police powers were insufficient to stop terrorism. This is simply not borne out by the facts.”

So now the feds, whose salaries we pay, can spy on us with drones we paid for too. They can send a swat team to disappear us...and keep us in prison.

Our question is: ‘what gives them the right?’ What bread to these people eat? What air do they breathe?

We’ve seen the theories. We’ve seen them in practice too. The ‘divine right of kings.’ The ‘social contract.’ ‘From each according to his abilities...’ ‘The greatest good for the greatest number.’

What they all have in common is that they are not theories, but apologia. One claims to know God’s own plan. Another imagines that the powerless masses agreed to be pushed around. Still another pretends that it’s for their own good.

Some of the excuses are implausible or unbelievable. Others are absurd. The ‘theories’ make no sense. But the facts are undeniable. And the fact is that there are always some people who are willing, ready and able to boss others around. Some rulers — the ‘insiders’ — are smarter than others. Some are nicer. Over time, you see all sorts. Their goal is always the same — to take power and wealth away from the outsiders. How much? As much as they can get away with.

You may wonder, for example, how come the governments of the developed countries all seem to be in the same deep hole of debt. If you listened to the politicians, for example, you might conclude that France and America were an ocean apart. Actually, overall tax, spending, and debt levels are similar in all OECD nations. And tax levels, generally, are about 10 times higher than they were in the last century. And their forms of government are about the same too — even though the insiders claim to have very different ideas about how to govern.

What happened?

The genius of modern democracy is that it makes the citizen a party to his own enslavement. Rather than give up 10% of his output to his feudal lord and master, he gives up 30% to 50% to his democratically-elected bosses. They tell him what to do. And he believes he is giving the orders!

And then, he believes he has discovered the best form of government in the world. It is so good he can’t wait to force others to be democrats too.

Obama and Geithner: Government, Enron-Style

Strongly recommendthis pieceat theHuffington Postby Jeff Connaughton, a former aide to Senator Ted Kaufman. Jeff is one of the smartest guys on the Hill and is particularly strong on issues surrounding Wall Street and the regulatory system. In this piece, he takes apart the oft-stated mantra that what Wall Street firms did during and after the crisis was maybe unethical, but not illegal.

He takes particular aim at Barack Obama, who recently tossed that line out on60 Minutesin what I thought was one of the real low moments of his presidency. Here’s Jeff’s take:

Speaking in Kansason December 6, [Obama] said, "Too often, we've seen Wall Street firms violating major anti-fraud laws because the penalties are too weak and there's no price for being a repeat offender." Just five days later on60 Minutes, hesaid, "Some of the least ethical behavior on Wall Street wasn't illegal." Which is it? Have there been no prosecutions because Wall Street acted legally (albeit unethically)? Or did Wall Street repeatedly violate major anti-fraud laws (and should thus find itself in the dock)?

The President is confusing "legal" with "difficult to prosecute successfully."

The notion that what Wall Street firms did was merely unethical and not illegal is not just mistaken but preposterous: most everyone who works in the financial services industry understands that fraud right now is not just pervasive but epidemic, with many of the biggest banks committing entire departments to the routine commission of fraud and perjury – every single one of the major banks, for instance, devotes significant manpower to robosigning affidavits for foreclosures and credit card judgments, acts which are openly and inarguably criminal.

Banks and hedge funds routinely withhold derogatory information about the instruments they sell, they routinely trade on insider information or ahead of their own clients’ orders, and corrupt accounting is so rampant now that industry analysts have begun to figure in estimated levels of fraud in their examinations of the public disclosures of major financial companies.

Beyond that, as Jeff points out, Obama is simply not telling the truth about the supposedly insufficient penalties available to regulators. Employing the famous"mistakes were made"use of the passive tense, Obama copped out in his December 6 speech by saying that “penalties are too weak." As Jeff points out, what Obama should have said is that "the penalties my own regulators chose to dish out were too weak":

Moreover, the President ismisleadingus when he says that Wall Street firms violate anti-fraud law because the penalties are too weak. Repeat financial fraudsters don't pay relatively paltry -- and therefore painless -- penalties because of statutory caps on such penalties. Rather, regulatory officials, appointed by Obama, negotiated these comparatively trifling fines. This week, theF.D.I.C. settleda suit against Washington Mutual officials for just $64 million, an amount that will be covered mostly by insurance policies WaMu took out on behalf of executives, who themselves will pay just $400,000. And recently a federal judge rejected the S.E.C.'s latest settlement with Citigroup, an action even theWall Street Journalcalled "a rebuke of the cozy relationship between regulators and the regulated that too often leaves justice as an orphan."

What makes Obama’s statements so dangerous is that they suggest an ongoing strategy of covering up the Wall Street crimewave. There is ample evidence out there that the Obama administration has eased up on prosecutions of Wall Street as part of a conscious strategy to prevent a collapse of confidence in our financial system, with the expected 50-state foreclosure settlement being the landmark effort in the cover-up, intended mainly to bury a generation of fraud. Here’s how Jeff puts it:

In Ron Suskind's book,Confidence Men, hequotesTreasury Secretary Timothy Geithner as saying, "The confidence in the system is so fragile still... a disclosure of a fraud... could result in a run, just like Lehman." The Obama Administration ispushinghard for a 50-state settlement with the major banks for their fraudulent foreclosure practices, even though several state attorneys general have rejected this approach because, in their view, it would shield too much wrongdoing. Regrettably, Obama's top officials and lawyers seem more eager to restore the financial sector to health than establish criminal accountability among the executives who were in charge.

In other words, Geithner and Obama are behaving like Lehman executives before the crash of Lehman, not disclosing the full extent of the internal problem in order to keep investors from fleeing and creditors from calling in their chits. It’s worth noting that this kind of behavior – knowingly hiding the derogatory truth from the outside world in order to prevent a run on the bank – is, itself,fraud!

This is exactly the mindset that led Lehman to the abuses of the"Repo 105" accounting trick, in which loans were disguised as revenues in order to prevent the outside world from knowing the dire state of the bank’s balance sheet.

Now Obama and Geithner are engaged in the same sort of activity, only they’re trying to prevent a run not on an individual bank, but the entire American financial services sector. Geithner seems really to believe that if fraud were aggressively policed, and the world made aware of the incredible extent of the illegality in our markets, that international confidence in the American financial sector would plummet and our economy would suffer – and suffer, incidentally, on Barack Obama’s watch.

Better, apparently, the Band-Aid the problem now, and let the real mess happen later on, on someone else’s watch, or at least in a second term, when there’s no need to worry about re-election.

Of course, this is exactly the wrong way to go about things. If Geithner and Obama really wanted to convince the world that America’s markets weren’t broken, they would effectively police fraud, and by extension prove to everybody that at the very least, our regulatory system is not broken.

But by taking a dive on fraud, and orchestrating mass cover-ups like the coming foreclosure settlement fiasco, what they’re doing instead is signaling to the world that not only are our financial markets corrupt, but our government is broken as well.

The problem with companies like Lehman and Enron is that their executives always think they can paper over illegalities by committing more crimes, when in fact all they’re usually doing is snowballing the problem so completely out of control that there’s no longer any chance of fixing things, thereby killing the only chance for survival they ever had.

This is exactly what Obama and Geithner are doing now. By continually lying about the extent of the country’s corruption problems, they’re adding fraud to fraud and raising such a great bonfire of lies that they probably won’t ever be able to fix the underlying mess.

If they looked at the world like public servants, and not like corporate executives, they’d understand that the only way out is to come clean. That theydon’tlook at things that way should tell people quite a lot.